Peter Wilentz was
spending Thursday evening at a party with his fellow
accountants. To be precise, he
spent thursday evening with his friends
in a hot tub, fully clothed, and with Montserrat
pumping
bad perfume into the air. His host tactfully hinted that clothes
were not a necessity in a hot tub, that they
might even be optional, and that they
certainly were not fashionable.

"Of course it's not fashionable. If we wanted to be fashionable
we wouldn't be accountants."

"But you're soaking wet. You'll get pneumonia."

"Nonsense. I've already gotten it by sitting fully clothed in a
hot tub, so I can't get it twice.
The worst
thing that would happen is if I came
down with a cold, and I have no objection to receiving all the colds the world can offer. But don't mind me,
go right ahead with your decadent and
sensuous lifestyle and simply pretend I'm not here. You could
have even sex with that rather stupid
woman sitting
beside you. I wouldn't notice, though
Montserrat will be filling the air with
tortoise cologne
to make sure I don't have to
notice."

"This woman is my wife!"

"Oh dear, don't tell me you're one of those liberals who think that just because you're married you can have
sex. Not that I, as a devout Jew, have
anything against marital sex. Quite the contrary: no
religion recognizes and places the proper
highest value
on marital sex as Judaism. No
other religion treats the subject with the maturity and profundity the subject deserves. No other religion
gives the female orgasm with the proper respect,
especially Islam. All of Judaism treats marital sex as a positive
good, in complete contrast to the
life-denying
dogmas of other faiths. But there
is a distinction between valuing sex and actually engaging in it.
Particularly on the part of people
who have
never considered the subtle, complex
philosophical ramifications, and in fact show an alarming shallowness about the subject. Certainly
people like you, who incessantly talk
about their feelings, smoke illegal narcotics from time to time, actually like E.L. Doctorow and Graham Greene,
and would never cover Alger Hiss with
excrement even if you had a perfectly good opportunity to do so. And you're so obvious about the Song of
Songs. But as I said, don't mind me at
all. I will simply sit here and read
elegant and thought provoking articles
in Commentary. I will read profound articles about the great problems in civilization and the need to
confront
the growing decadence. And you, in
your turn, can contribute to that decadence all you want."

That same thursday evening Ignatius Wilentz was at a meeting and was conducting an exam to Mary Lightfeathers via
cellular phone. "Talmudic exegesis.
Question One. Offer thirty-seven reasons why lizard-flambé
can be served
for dinner."

"But it can't be. The Torah specifically forbids it."

"No, Miss Sarahson, that is a reason against serving it. The aim
of the exercise is to provide thirty-seven
reasons for serving it. Please try again,
Miss Sarahson."

At
the same time Ms. Roda Ellen Van P--- was having a conversation with the official from the Thai embassy.
To be precise she was chatting with him
as he hung upside down, outside the apartment window, and she was chatting with him with a large machete in her
hand. If it seems odd that we have
not mentioned Ms. Roda Ellen Van P--- for the fast few chapters, perhaps it would be wise to reveal that in fact
we have seen her several times as the
Master of the Marthas, the Master and the Margarita, Martha and the Muffins, and have some Madeira,
my dear. As part of her responsibilities
she planted marigolds in her carpet and subjected them to a special saline solution in order to make the
crucial element of mermaid soap.
It was she, along with her Thai maid, who had appeared before Vanessa and Elizabeth six days earlier as part of the
Flannery O'Connor Brigade and it was she
who had planted a bugged copy of George Bernanos's Diary of A Country Priest. Because of the bug Ms.
Roda Ellen Van P--- now knew that Elizabeth
Concrete had just gotten married to Charles Harding, a development that she found very disturbing.

But
it was not Elizabeth that
bothered
Ms. Roda Ellen Van P--- at this moment.
It was the continued attraction between her maid and the Thai embassy official. As Ms van P--- leaned
down to talk to the dangling man she
asked "Have you ever heard of the story of Jezebel?"

"Uh, no I haven't."

"Well Jezebel was an evil queen of Israel,
responsible for the murders of many of
God's prophets. So at last God appointed a general to seize power. Jehu, the general, assassinated
Jezebel's
son, the present king and he and his followers raced to Samariawhere they saw the haughty queen
standing by a high window, not unlike the way
I am standing right now. And as Jezebel
was leaning over the window sill, the servants who were inside, much like my maid is currently inside tending to
the marigolds, all got together and
pushed her out the window to her death, where the dogs ate her
up. And do
you know why I am telling you this?"

"No."

"I'm telling you this because there's no way on earth this could ever happen to me. What I am more concerned
about is your secret conversation with
my maid where you said that she should dump 'this crazy woman' and go
off and
elope with you."

"Oh did I say that?"

"You certainly did. My maid's lingerie is wiretapped, so I could
hear you very clearly."

"Well I must have been joking. But is it wrong to want to make
her a honest woman?"

"She's already an honest woman."

"Then she can make me an honest man."

"I don't see why that's necessary. Personally I think that
hanging you upside-down twenty-two feet
above the
ground where you would surely break your
neck if I cut this rope with this machete would you make a model of
veracity. In fact I'm sure of it, I've done
tests. But you seem to
misunderstand the nature of my mermaid soap. Once
it is mass-produced it shall make
sexuality complete irrelevant. Hundreds
of millions of woman shall be liberated from the voracious demands of their husbands. When I first
met my maid she was working as a waitress in
one of the more tactful brothels in Bangkok.
She was a young girl then, too nervous
and emaciated to make a good prostitute, but she was gaining confidence and weight at such a rate that her
entry into the profession was inevitable.
But when I met her I thought she would make the perfect servile companion, and so I spoke to her in perfect
Thai (an advantage you understand of
only sleeping six hours a night since the age of twelve) and she agreed to follow me. I have since
taught her how to polish the silver, how
to handle hydrochloric acid without maiming herself, and how to speak English (as well as French, just in case my
father calls.) So naturally I have
no wish to throw this all away just so that you could have your way with her and then simply abandon her."

"I can't believe you're a citizen of Thailand."

"My dear embassy official, I'm as much a citizen of the Thai republic as you are."

"Thailand's
a monarchy."

"Yes, it is, isn't it. How unfortunate." And she gave a
huge hack at the rope with her machete.

"Kindly don't scream. It will wear out your vocal cords and will
not bring you any assistance. So
you
simply must understand that if you touch a pubic
hair with your head I will simply have
no choice but to kill you."

It
was not easy for the embassy official to form an argument with all his blood rushing to his head, but
"Aren't you being ungrateful? After all the
work I've done to make sure that your landlord
doesn't get his hands on your maid."

"I don't see why I should be. You only want her for yourself."

"Perhaps she wants me for herself." But then Miss Van P--- gave another hack at the rope, and he
promptly backtracked. "ThoughIcouldbeverymuchmistaken!"

"No, of course not. That would be too extreme. I think I
shall
let you remain there for a few more
hours. I have some work to do, and I simply can't
let myself be disturbed." And
she closed the window and went back to her
desk.

The
revelations had returned to Vivian Chelmnickon in the aftermath of Dr. Roget's visit. In his mind there
were images of an angel flying over the
roofs of Ottawa, a tax
auditor
being audited, and the shining image of a noose.

Adrian Verrall had, since his return from Medicine
Hat,
tried to seduce three more girls.
The black eye he received made him unable to cook dinner
so the bouncing blue ball had made him some
eggs. Since the ball didn't have a mouth, it was not surprising
that it was not very interested in making
sure the
eggs tasted good. So the result
was a most unappetizing mulch which was, however, very high in protein and low in cholesterol. Lucian
Rudman was at her home reading her textbooks
and wondering whether you could arrange a "Whodunit Mystery Weekend" with 371 people. She
thought about comets and wondered where you could
use them to create an interplanetary
train system. She was slightly disturbed
to hear strange sounds outside her apartment but she learned to ignore
them. Absent mindedly she used the latest petition
of Aquilla Rogers to have Miss Van
P--- expelled from Chattenden Passey to
sketch a few preliminary drawings.

At about eight o'clock that evening Genet
Vovelle made a
telephone call from Senegal
in order to speak to his eldest daughter. "Hello, father."
said Pandora Vovelle.
"How are you feeling today? It must be very early
in the morning."

"It is, but my measles makes it very difficult to sleep. I mean I
had just overcome my third outbreak of
chicken pox when I came down with the measles."

"You realize father this is punishment for your sins. I know that
sounds disrespectful and deliberately
rude,
but that's because it's meant to be.
From what I've learned the mother of your new child is younger than either of us. What is the name of our
new sibling?"

"Your baby brother is named after his father. He's a rather intelligent baby though he's only a few weeks
old, and I personally think he's very
attractive."

"No doubt he is. I myself can't wait to see a photograph of him,
so you must send us one as quickly as
possible. Well I'm actually fairly busy so
I can only hope that you keep suffering
horribly for your adultery. Have you
ever undergone mumps?"

"No, I haven't."

"Well, you soon will. Goodbye father."

"Pandora!"

"Yes, father?"

"I know you'll always side with your mother. She was always with
you as a child, and even now in New
Brunswick she gives you your strength. There is something, however, that I have to
tell you. There is one thing that
you don't realize..."

But Pandora then hung up on her father.

Constantine Rudman was
sitting on his couch, thinking about Vivian Chelmnickon,
or rather lolling on his couch
brooding about Vivian Chelmnickon.
He could not think about his homework, or about his essays or even
about the
grove of thorns. Only Chelmnickon, only how
he whimpered whenever he remembered their
meetings, only how he always made a fool
of himself whenever he appeared to him, only how he always raved
against
Chelmnickon behind his back, only how he
would sneak a peak at Chelmnickon's works and give vicious,
unfair summaries of them.

And
what about that piece in The Times literary Supplement? How dare that bold fashionable pipsqueak say that the
European left was pro-Brezhnev?
Not that he gave any evidence, but of course bold courageous people
don't need
to give such pedestrian things as facts
or evidence or even logic when sneering at the left. All those
sleazy bastards. How they claim how
Reagan brought
down the Soviet Union, and how they sneer at
those who
had reservations, not that they're ever
named or confronted, no, just an anonymous
leftist orthodoxy rampaging through the universities. If you say
you
support Reagan and foreign policy, you're not just
supporting Solidarity. To say that
he had a "good" foreign policy, you have
to support his "constructive
engagement" with Botha, and his support of the
tribal hack Buthelezi while piously
denouncing tribalism and racism. And
consider old Iraq,
how we couldn't compromise on its annexation of Kuwait,
but we let Botha and Malan hold on to Namibia
for eight years, to get the Cubans out,
and what about UNITA, who cried and shit their pants and slit
others throats when they lost, and who
had the support of Botha, Mobuto, Deng
Xiaoping, and all free democrats of the world? And what about the support for Mobuto in Zaire,
allowing him and the fucking Belgian royals to
rape his country dry, and what about
Reagan's euphemisms for the Liberian generals,
and allowing Morocco
to swallow up the Spanish Sahara, and backing the warlords in Somalia?
And what about his support for the IMF, forcing austerity
on Algeria
and forcing down living standards so that only Islamic fanatics
could resist? And what about
the Palestinians, and Reagan's acquiescence
in the invasion of Lebanon,
and his support for the Maronite thugs
of Sabra and Shatila? And what about his policy on Iran
and Iraq,
leaving aside "October Surprise" and
Bank of International Credit and Commerce,
we fund both sides and let them bleed their own countries to death while we sonorously prattle on how fanatical
Muslims
are? And we forget that it was Iraq
who shot the U.S. Stark and what about the USS Vincennes, five years after our very useful condemnation
of KAL OO7, which is also full of
holes? And what about Pakistan;
how we tried to end dictatorship in Afghanistan
by propping up despotism in Pakistan?
And how we played footsie with Marcos
and the South Korean bureaucrats. And how we crippled the Vietnamese; you can say what you like about
the party, but its not fair, not honorable,
what we did to them. In order to have the embargo removed, the Vietnamese must do two things. First,
they must withdraw from Cambodia,
after having removed the bloodiest of
Stalinist dictatorships, whom when it was
in power the Republicans, and the neo-cons, and the Encounterists used to vindicate their atrocities in the Vietnam
War, but when it was out of power they
all made sure that it kept its seat in the UN, and gave it all the money it wanted to fight the Vietnamese,
while pretending that some puff-piece
liberal was really in charge. Second, the Vietnamese must give explanations for 2,500 missing Americans, half
of whom Reagan knew, or should have
known, were dead anyway, and consider that the missing rate is the lowest for any American war fought this
century, and consider there isn't a
shred of evidence that a single man might be alive, but there's been a nice industry of hoax-mongers and
mercenaries who pretend there is, and consider
all the soldiers in the first place, how the neo-cons, and neo-liberals and NeuteredRepublic, shouted how
cruel the
left was to the returning soldiers, how
they sneered at the college education of the protestors,
how they extolled the noble
working-class origins of the soldiers,
how they sobbed at how unappreciated they were in decadent America,
and how they deliberately let them die horrible painful expensive deaths and forged studies because they would
rather let the soldiers die in agony
than make the dioxin companies pay a single cent for Agent
Orange. And there's the agreement
with Indonesia
to let them butcher East Timor, and the brothels in Thailand.
And there's the billions spent on useless nuclear weapons
which could have been used to wipe out
poverty, wipe out illiteracy. And
there's the blood purge in Latin America, and
how Nixon
saw democracy die in Argentina,
Chile
and Uruguay
and didn't care, and how they whitewashed
Videla, and how in Brazil
they choose one corrupt capitalist crony
after another each time saying that this one would be nice and decent and efficient and they wouldn't at all be like
those corrupt predecessors, and each one
was more corrupt and incompetent than before. And there were the massacres in Guatemala,
in El Salvador,
and after not giving a shit about Somoza
when he was in power, no after praising Somoza when he was in power, they found the Sandinistas and their
free elections too dictatorial and they
sent drug-dealing rapists to slaughter and bleed the country. And
they did all of this in your name,
Vivian
Chelmnickon. All of this was done on
your behalf Vivian Chelmnickon, the reason that you are free not to return to your country was because they raped
and massacred uncounted thousands of
innocent people who hadn't done you a bit of harm. And why not? Because they're only half-caste
whores who deserve to have their cunts slashed
and their breasts cut off, they're cultureless holes and they don't know anything and they'll never possess your
inimitable pedigree of suffering.
And what about Cyprus?
Cyprus
partitioned thanks to Nixon's and Kissinger's
schemes with Greek dictators and Turkish authoritarians. Now Reagan gave a Turkish dictatorship carte
blanche. But that's not the worse of
it. You could expect the Republican party to support any NATO dictatorship, it's like puppy love, or son of
a bitch love, but what about us?
Here we've spend thirty years guarding Cyprus
and we haven't done anything to make
sure the Greek majority get the land which the Turkish army illegally expelled them from. No we just
prattle on about how "internationalist"
we are, how "peace-keeping" we are, how we "keep the two sides
apart", but we wouldn't ever do
anything to help, oh no, we'd never use
our influence to pressure the United
States
and Turkey
to
do the right thing. And it's not
just the sycophantic tories who don't do anything. The liberals didn't do anything while they were in
power and what about the New Democratic
Party? And it's the same thing in Bosnia.
We're supposed to be the
internationalist ones, but we don't give a damn,, don't do anything, don't ever think of anything beyond our
"fashionable" confines, don't ever help
the socialists in Cyprus,
just do fashionable prattle, mindless thinking,
no critical rigidity, nobody cares, nobody knows, nobody ever knows how to think in the party.

Constantine
stopped. Much of this was hardly fair, though the stuff on the NDP was right on the money. After
all it wasn't as if Vivian Chelmnickon
had actually supported any of these actions. And was it his job for him to do so? He had his own
dictatorship to fight. (But was that just an
evasion, treating eastern european
dissidents the way fashionable hard-hearted
pragmatic liberals claim wishy-washy sentimental liberals treat black and third-worlders: allowing them
to indulge their sentimentality and their
vindictiveness and letting them go on in a muddled way, and give facile solutions to intractable
problems? Or was this too an evasion?) And wasn't
it wrong to criticize his views on Israel?
After all, can Polandtruly have too few Zionists?
And
wasn't all this in bad faith, ignoring and denigrating
Chelmnickon's suffering, while he
lived a comfortable and fatuous life in
this most comfortable and fatuous of countries? And who are you, living in one of the world's wealthiest
countries, to criticize the consumerism
of the new Eastern Europe? It raises
expectations
that can't be filled, and it could lead
to disaster, but it's not for you to criticize. And
you haven't even bothered to read The
History and Limitations of Hegelian
Analysis? Who are you to say anything at all, you, filled to the brim with "intolerable" and
"excruciating" guilt, but who hasn't changed your
life one iota?

The
smells again, the stinks again, I must suffer them all again, must suffer them even though I do not experience
them. Must realize again and again
the pettiness of our humanity. "Man's a rotter, and his critics
even more so." What we need is
misanthropy with a human face, not liberalism with
a human facade, no more iron fists in
velvet revolution gloves. I don't
understand love, I've never experienced it, I can't imagine it. That's not it, I can only imagine it, for I've
never seen anyone like it. My
parents didn't love each other, and I didn't even love them, but of course that's so obvious. You create an
abstraction and you giddily search for
flaws to show it couldn't possible exist. But it doesn't exist,
it's just a euphemism for lust and sexual
bad
faith, covered over with social mores
and economic coercion. Are men more likely to beat their wives
when they're pregnant? Or maybe
that's just
another media rumour that we'll soon all
forget we ever thought. And isn't it all biological, or
moderately biological enough whatever the
fashionable
euphemisms the biological determinists
have? Women are unequal because biologists say they're unequal so any equality is impossible. Or
they're morally superior, like the psychologists
say, and men are such weak-willed fools any equality is impossible.
Or both sexes are equal, but
they're such wretched people that only
philosophers far away from women, like Nietzsche, are any good.
I'm supposed to be a socialist, but I'd
prefer any
truth from on high, even if it was only
that everyone are rats and they should be ground to power in the generators of my Maclaurin series. Why
do I have to live in a world of flesh
when We can live in a world of lead? Of course, it's so obvious,
it takes so much courage, so much
bravery.
It's not our fault that people live in
poverty and sickness and disease in the midst of our wealthy society, it's their fault. It's not our fault
that despite our repeated interventions
and our callous racism and our greed that Latin America
is a continent of poor, unstable
pseudo-democracies, it's their fault. It's not our
fault that because we refuse to arrange
decent universal prenatal care and
refuse maternity leave, paid or unpaid, and because we refuse to give care to poor women who can't pay, that many of
these women give birth to poor babies
who live in rotten surroundings; no, it's their fault. No, it's not our fault that because we looted and
drained Ireland
and treated its people as if they were
pigs and manipulated religious sectarianism that it's a
poor country racked with religious strife;
no, it's the Irish's fault. It's
not our fault that we did the same to Africa
and Asia
with similar results; no, it's their
fault. But then you're hardly being fair, are you? When you look at it each democracy in Latin
America is looking better and better,
except when it isn't. There's
progress in Mexico,
progress in Brazil,
progress in Argentina,
just as there was progress in the past, and everything's
getting better in those
countries, until of course they aren't and
there's a really big crisis, and it turns out the models of the IMF and
The Economist were practicing
Keynesianism on
the sly, and so of course they collapsed.
And there is a whole horde of scholarship that shows beyond any doubt that the Irish nationalist historical
narrative couldn't possibly be true
because it plays into the hands of the IRA. And all the journals agree, there is no evidence that the Irish
really supported nationalism anyway, and
if they did it was only because they were bigoted and stupid. What kind of Marxist ignores Bew and Patterson
and the third one, what's his name, so
easily? And aren't African-Americans horribly victimized by liberals and just waiting to be liberated by
school vouchers? After all, we've
been looking for progress for three decades and if we wait long enough and complacently enough we'll see it, or
ignore it until it comes. We must have
the courage to say that the Anglo-American middle class are the most wonderful people in the world, that they have
never committed any mortal sins, that
they have alleviated any injustice as fast and quickly as they possibly could, we must have the courage to
say that the middle class that rules our
world, runs ours newspapers, owns our money and elects our governments, we must have the bold, striving,
stunning courage to say that they are
completely innocent of any of the world's problems. And anybody who suffers in this world can purge himself of
his sins by simply groveling over to the
grand temple of western civilization and on his belly shout out all his sins, where he (or she) will be
anointed as a bold new unfashionable intellectual
and be allowed to take a bath in leaden semen. Lead will save the world, the fact that a disproportionately
high number of black children in the United
States suffer from lead poisoning
notwithstanding. All this maggot-ridden
flesh will be replaced with eternal lead. The scent of lead will be a new aphrodisiac as sexuality will be
replaced with the eternal loves of
stock-market quotations, people will get three full meals of lead every day, as the shiny material sings and
stings on their tongue. Lead will
purge us of all the petty fights, the cheap adulteries, the easily obtained whores, the beatings, the kitsch of
domesticity, the mindless sentimentalities,
the tomatoes that hit John Seinkewicz in the middle of the night, the truckling to your own children, the
amoral sensuousness of an irresponsible
and decadent media, the diluted cultures, the mindless solitudes,
the cheap empathy-sessions, the
endless trivia of sexuality; it will
purge all this and so much more from our marriages, and put it all on a
leaden plain of responsibility, as we
move to
a world that must be perfect, because it
is the best of all-possible worlds.

Constantine
rose. It was time again for him to bleed himself. He spread out the Citizens, undid his shirt
sleeve, wrapped the tourniquet around
his arm, and raised the knife into the air.

When suddenly his arm was twisted around his back and Constantine
was thrust to the floor.

Keeping
track of the
boring proceedings around him Ignatius Wilentz continued
his examination.
"Question Number Two: Discuss the influence of The
Song of Songs/The Song of Solomon on the
life and philosophy of Baruch Spinoza."

Madame
Vovelle was
reviewing the correspondence of the Flannery O'Connor
Brigade, and she remembered an
incident in her past. She had been invited
to address a congregation one fine
Sunday in Montréal, where the cardinal
himself would be there to hear her speak. The congregation
greeted her politely and applauded as she
approached
the rostrum.

"I could not really come up with a talk before you today, so I thought that I would talk about my impressions of this
congregation. And the first thing
that strikes me is how well dressed you all are. You are all in
your best suits and dresses and, and,
and....

"And I can't stop thinking how utterly appalling this all is. Do
you really think that God cares the
slightest about how you dress? That He intends
these Sunday services to be some sort
of Fashion show? It's not that He
wants you to appear in blue jeans and casual clothes, because clearly that's the sort of laziness only the UnitedChurch would
tolerate. But I am going to very
blunt; only
meretricious whores would dress up like this.
Only stupid shallow girls with lipstick minds and petticoat souls would dare affront the Lord like this.
In fact, I'm going to attack you all personally.
Now if we were nineteenth-century Anglicans we would snot and snort about all the poor people and their
shabby clothes in their rented pews.
But because we're all Catholics, I'm going to start off by attacking the rich people first. In the front row
there is an attractive seventeen year
old girl, the brown-haired one sitting by her mother, whom, I have learned from reasonably well-informed sources,
is having sexual relations with the
leader of her school's volleyball team. I want to propose to you that we stone her to death. Now
obviously only people without sin can cast the
first stone, (after that it's anyone
game.) And who is without sin? Well,
I personally think that the dear
cardinal here is as good a candidate for
sainthood as anyone else, so would you mind casting the first stone, your grace?"

"No, thank you. It was kind of you to ask though."

"Oh. All right." And Madame Vovelle sat down and the
service proceeded as usual.

Vanessa
was remembering
the love letters her cousin-in-law read to her during
his first frantic Christmas without
Natasha. They were like Aunt Sarah's
letters, less moving than amusing, and less amusing than uninteresting.
Typical lines were
"Your goblet is like a navel that never lacks
apricot punch," and "Your hips
cover me with kisses, your wine is better
than love." She remembered how crushed Giles was at her laughter,
more sarcastic derision, and she
remembered
the first time she saw her uncle laughing
at Sarah's letters. "How can you treat her like that?" she
asked rhetorically, since she already
knew how a brother could treat a sister. "I'm
sorry, but there are limits to
compassion, and there is only so much sympathy
you can have for people who just breed and bleed and advertise their misery." She wondered if this
sort of heartlessness was endemic to her
family. If it was, then it was a strange sort of heartlessness,
since Ignatius sent considerable amounts
of money to
his sister, and tried to arrange all sorts
of jobs with assorted Israeli friends. True, the money often got lost, or it ended up in post offices
that spontaneously burst into flames,
while the friends who were supposed to give a good job to Felix Simricky had the bad habit of suddenly dying,
being run over by camels, assassinated
by Syrian terrorists, being arrested for treason and suffering from intense spells of dyslexia. And
everytime he heard about this, Ignatius
wrote another check, and couldn't stop laughing.

Constantine Rudman
got up from the floor to notice three men who had somehow
materialized in the darkness.
The first two wore black suits, with large
floppy hats, and with the strange accents that could be heard from their titterings, they seemed like parodies of
Italian mobsters, though Constantine
was not laughing. "Who are you?"

The
leader stepped forward, while another man close behind him flicked a switchblade in and out. Behind both of
him was an old, silent man whose hands
were behind his back. He clearly had the most dignity. The
leader
spoke. "I call myself Marinetti. Over here, Gabriel's
parents called themselves
D'Annunzio."

"But you're all supposed to be dead! What are you doing in my apartment?"

"Why we're here for the same reason that a horde of insurance agents invaded Medicine Hat
two days ago. And for the same reason that Dr. Oliver Corpse received twenty butterflies in his mail
yesterday. And we're here for the
same reason that there's going to be a big Wagner rally in Ottawa
in a few day's time. But..."
and he laughed, "not for so benevolent a reason."

D'Annunzio closed his switchblade for the last time and from his sleeve took out Constantine's
steak knife, as Marinetti continued. "We too represent
art, but art for a different
purpose. It is said that irony is the
glory of slaves. So iron must be the glory of slaveholders.
Iron
and Lead, this shall be our future, and
we will create an art that pays homage to
it; image poetry filled with long lines of indecipherable metaphors
that will crash down on the vulgar's head
like a
guillotine; paintings made with special
lead compounds, we will repaint Rembrandt and Raphael, and as the sweaty crowd of Libyans, proles and Abyssinians
crowd in one hot holiday sunday, and the
room is suffocated with their ungodly stink, the room will grow hotter and hotter, until the special
compounds boil over and asphyxiate the
worthless slugs with mustard gas. We shall broadcast ballets of executions on television and radio, and out of
the barren rock we will sculpt prisons
for our enemies. We will write novels about the great pack wolves of humanity, and how they rip and tear
the weak and infirm venison of the
world. And we are here, for the bloodpurge."

"The what?"

"We've been waiting for this for centuries. Waiting for
damnation, waiting for the climax, when a
conspiracy
shall murder someone who is already
dead. And on that day hope itself, false liberalism itself,
humanitarianism itself, will die a wheezing, petty, self-pitying
and valueless death. And we
will take over in its place. Oooo,
Gaabrieel?"

D'Annunzio moved to the third man, while Marinetti went to introduce him. "Constantine Rudman, may I
introduce to you Vilfredo Pareto. I would like
to say more, but Mr. Pareto can't
respond. That's because we cut out his
tongue. You wouldn't happened to
have any knowledge of this man?"

"I vaguely know who he is." replied Constantine.

"Allow me to tell you more. Pareto here is one of the founders of
modern sociology. He is also
one of this
century's foremost anti-Marxists, known
for his work on the circulation of elites and the impossibility of a real democracy. He is also known for his
pungent comments on such sickly phenomena
as humanitarianism and pacifism. So we naturally thought that he would make a perfect fascist. But we
were wrong. You see, what did he do when
Il Duce took power? He ran off to Switzerland,
wrote a manifesto 'in support' that
called for free speech and liberty. And that really annoyed us. It's so hard to get good
intellectuals on our side: Croce, Ortega y Gasset,
Unamuno, Nietzsche. Just when
you think they oppose liberal democracy
and you can really count on them to keep their mouths shut while you crack a few skulls they go racing back to
grounds of common decency. Once a
whore, always a whore? Not in Croce's case, we were really all
quite annoyed. Not like Ludwig von
Mises at
all, who was so sympathetic to us before
the Anschluss. Now there's a man who realize to get liberty you
need lots of lead and a few
thumbscrews. But
this dilly-dallying by Pareto here, it's
extremely annoying, and we're simply not going to take it
anymore. Gabriel is going to torture
Wilfred here until
he cries. Then we're going to kill
him."

The
contempt in Pareto's eyes belied Marinetti's smug assurances as the latter checked his handcuffs, while
D'Annunzio removed the tourniquet from
Rudman's arm. Marinetti turned back to Rudman. "The problem
with torture is its aesthetic side. I mean so many torturers
have no sense of their artistic
possibilities in their work. Some castrations
here, broken limbs there, electroshock and cigarette burns, it's all so ordinary. That is why I am one
the most resolute opponents of torture
in the world; I just can't let worthless amateurs go mucking
about. You see, I have a
dream. I have a
vision. I see today a world of wretched people,
of people who either have to be led,
or to be prevented from leading. I
see a world of malcontents spreading toxin with their stilted bodies. I see women malcontents,
crab-faced lesbians, seeking to emasculate men
with sociology textbooks. So many
ugly people producing so many ugly thoughts.
And I say to myself, this does not have to exist. For I see a new world, still filled with ugly people, but
these people are marked, separated,
segregated, unable to spread harm or semen throughout the generations, and on their backs, or on their
fronts, lie the masterpieces of torturers.
Consider Pareto here. I have managed to create two separate sorts of acids. One creates a green pus
when used on the body, the other a yellow
pus. Combine both of the two, and make enough slits on his back,
and I can give you the flag of Italy!
A just punishment for this disingenuous traitor,
don't you think so?"

"No." said Constantine,
summoning the courage to speak.

"Well,
if that's your attitude, then you won't get to see it. We did come here for other reasons. Gabriel,
please." D'Annunzio retrieved a suitcase
and opened it before Marinetti, who
took out the contents. "We have
all sorts of wonderful things here, and we're eager with anticipation to try them out. Here we have an
old-fashioned camera. American, I think. Gabriel,
do you know what year this comes
from?"

"1922."

"Yes, 1922. That's very likely. Of course it's supposed to
be attached to a tripod, but that wouldn't
fit in
the suitcase." Marinetti placed
it in the far corner of the kitchen counter. "Ooo. I like
this. Castor oil, the all-purpose
medicine of the future. But don't worry, we shan't
give you a dose. Rocks from Gibraltar,
and funeral services from Dublin,
I don't think you'll find those too interesting. Some blackmail notes in French, you can't trust those
homosexuals. But this, this is very interesting. Gabriel,
please
come here."

D'Annunzio extracted what at first appeared to be some rope, but what was in fact a noose. "Fine
craftsmanship, don't you think? Of course electric
chairs are so much quicker, so we shouldn't
be sentimental. But this noose goes back a long way, back to the last century in fact. It was this very
noose that in 1891 hanged a Mrs. A. Clare.
Naturally you've never heard of the woman, but we consider her execution to be one of the greatest moments in
Anglo-Saxon justice. And, of course,
it's so much better than a tourniquet."

"What?" but before Constantine
could do anything, D'Annunzio wrapped the
noose around his neck and was yanking him into the kitchen. He
dragged Constantine
to the refrigerator, thrust him to one side, and started throttling him
from
the other, using the refrigerator as a
pulley. As Constantine
was
being throttled Marinetti chortled.
"Why do you resist? Don't you know that hemp will save the world?"

Constantine
gasped and sputtered, but he managed to slip the noose off his neck. Immediately he fell to the
ground and struggled to catch his breath
as the Futurists laughed. He started to get up. "You won't
win. I'll fight you."

"You fight us? Your country doesn't have the will, you're simply
soft wax that any demagogue can inscribe
on whatever he likes. And you just want a
talmudist who will inscribe you in her own
image."

"Well, suppose I do..." But then Marinetti extracted a box of chocolates from his suitcase. "It
would be better if you had some sweets. Allow
me to offer you some." Still
dazed and on his knees Constantinereached out and swallowed a very good
one with
milk chocolate and caramel. "These
must be poisoned."

"Now I consider that an insult!" said Marinetti, and he was
justified, because the chocolates were
actually quite delicious and not at all harmful, even
if you considered the sugar
content. "It's such a pity you're so suspicious
because I think you're just the
sort of person whom I'd like to give all
my cherries. Well I'm afraid we simply have to go now." And
the three of them simply vanished,
leaving nothing behind except the 1922 camera on
the far kitchen counter that Constantine
had already forgotten.

At the
same time, in the
flat above Lucian Rudman and the one below Ms.
Roda Ellen Van P---, Vanessa Wilentz had
stopped remembering her relatives and
was working on her post-modernist project. Elizabeth
had stepped out that evening and she was alone in her room.
On the radio was a program from
CBC stereo, playing pieces of classical
music that were only occasionally interrupted by the announcer's fatuous comments. She nervously tapped
her pen on the desk three times, then
began to write.

"We behold a purge of lilacs, bursting through the snow. In a sea
of white we see toboggan
tracks." She had never seen the countryside, except on television, except for a skiing trip that
the school took her on, except when she
left Ottawa on family
vacations to Toronto.
Her father was even worse in this
respect, he had never seen cows until he had fled the ghetto, and almost gave himself away because he feared
they might try to eat him. "In
lilacs we see the impotence of our age." Then followed three
paragraphs of Adorno and hard
analysis. "Across the sea we came, we came and saw a world where even the rats were clean, we saw a
world where the lilacs had hope.
And we started the blood purge and in this country of snow and self-pity we made them irrelevant in their own
country, an endless dole for self-centered
bureaucrats and fashionable sociologists." That wasn't right, it was too political. Political in the
sense of too strong an opinion disturbing
experience. The infiltration of jargon. Perhaps a paragraph
on jargon versus anti-jargon? The
dialectic
of jargon versus anti-jargon producing
all sort of little jargons happily dancing with their toy rattles?

"For my professor, solipsism is very fashionable." She wouldn't include that in her final copy, but
it
was true that the professor's all time,
absolutely favourite novel this month was Alice
through the Looking Glass, and that he
always carried two mirrors in his pocket, so he could see the infinity of reflections in them. He
loved boolean logic and algebraic problems
(though he didn't understand either), helped write the analytical problems for the Graduate Record examinations
for the children of alumni, found
differential equations completely absorbing in his shallow way, and smuggled all this and much more into a
prize-winning essay on Emily Dickinson.
He personally believed that mathematics would be the next big thing in literary criticism, and he wanted to
be in on the ground floor. The
professor was a post-modernist, post-marxist, post-feminist, post-structuralist, post-Gaussian,
post-deconstructionist, post-political, post-apolitical
marxist, post-political marxist, post-talmudist-feminist, post-scholastic-feminist, post-scholastic
anti-feminist,
post-catholic, post structuralist-anthropologist,
post-marxist-feminist-structuralist, post-kantian-marxist-feminist-structuralist,
post-kantian-marxist-feminist-structuralist-anthropologist,
post-kantian-kantian-modernist-marxist-feminist-marxist-marxist,
post kantian-kantian-modernist-modernist-marxist-marxist-marxist-marxist,
post-marxist-marxist-marxist-marxist-marxist-scholastic-marxist-feminist-marxist-marxist-marxist,
and 100% pure Berkleyian. By
the
time you got all of this down on paper the essay
was half over, which may explain why her
professor was the most prolific author
on campus. The key thing was never to believe in anything too much and to be sure you always had an
escape hatch if things went wrong.
Of course all she was doing was simply smuggling in Faulkner and
Absalom! Absalom! into an English
essay. Some
snappy criticism, and then--bring on the
dancing wisteria! It was all terribly subversive, since
subversion could now be defined in weird
and wonderful
ways. One moment you're looking at
Paradise Lost, and then the subversive Risk games, the nihilistic chess
games, the shocking window cleaners
and the
revolutionary tenured professors.

"Imagine an infinity of mirrors creating infinity of
reflections." No, cross that
out, that was too much sucking up to the professor. Write the first thing that comes into your
head. "The talmud notes that there is nothing
worse for a bride to lose her groom
before her wedding night." Why had
she written that? Was it even
true? It was an appropriately sonorous statement,
but she might have gotten it from
reading the Jewish response to missionary
literature. Elizabeth,
thinking of Elizabeth.
It was
too late for her to lose Charles before
the wedding night, but... Did she want something
to happen to her? She was always envious about her sexual success, yes, how she was always the most
popular girl at any party. She envied
her carefree and obvious love with Charles, but she also envied the way that she cared only for Charles above and
beyond that. This monogamy, this
relative chastity contrasted with her own petty love affairs. It
was true, she sometimes fantasized about
being
invited to join in a threesome and it was
also true that she wished she could be invited so she could throw the offer back in their faces. She
resented her generosity as well; since the
Concretes were much wealthier than the Wilentzs, it was usually easier for Elizabeth
to pay her share of the rent, give her more generous birthday presents, buy more expensive and delicious
food. Elizabeth was
always
the one who paid for pizza, and she was
the one who brought in cable and paid it our
of her own pocket. Vanessa vaguely
wondered who she was going to get to take
her place when Elizabeth
went off
to join her husband. Her friends were
really Elizabeth's
friends.
Perhaps she could get Constantine's
sister to take over. Perhaps she
could get Aquilla Rogers to move in, as she brushed
aside her latest petition to get Ms,
van P--- evicted. She noticed that
fertilizer wasn't dripping on her head. Ms. Van P--- and her maid
must be busy tonight.

Woman's nature is twisted and molded by men to fit their own
desires. Now all that she needed is
a snappy line to
summarize all this. Think of something.
Think of something feminine. Or not so feminine, try some easy
dialectic,
neutered paradoxes for the Isaiah Berlin
crowd. Are paradoxes feminine? Then you can circumcise them
for your pleasure. T.S. Eliot and
Adrianne
Rich, united to confuse the world. Try
a teapot. "I saw a room of
teapots stuffed with turpentine instead of tea."
Turpentine doesn't quite have
the right rhythm. Try something equally
useful but not terribly pleasant. Not dangerous, like
hydrochloric acid. How about, how
about
lithium! That's it, the third element on the periodic
table. Women are saints,
whores, dull people you see in hairdresser's
shops, the writers of an inordinately large number of middlebrow
novels, and she was just a sour
Jewess lesbian that Elizabethcarries along out of her good
nature.
Charles thought that she would die for Elizabeth,
and she would, but just to show that she could do it, so she could show how much better she was, so she
could show that she was actually good
after all, so she could show that she was capable of some great relationship. She'll crucify myself, you
bastards. What do you actually do with
lithium anyway? She was actually looking forward to being
tortured to death, as long as it did not
involve great
amounts of pain. Not the fingernails,
more like malnutrition and sleep deprivation. Like in "The Confession." That's so much more
civilized than Beria. They use lithium in medicine,
don't they? When she first met
her, Elizabeth was so
charming and witty and clever in a
left-wing sort of
way. And she still is, but Vanessa couldn't
take it, thought it was sophomoric
and shallow. She envied that as well.
And of course admitting you're envious was really just a clever way of indulging in it, sort of practicing
masturbation under the guise of self-criticism.

Sexuality. Women do not particularly care for homosexuals, but
men can't live without lesbianism.
Denounce
all the feminists who really get under
their skin as dykes and drool all over their love-making.
Lesbianism is
porro unum est necessarium for every pornographic
magazine and video. In a "Big-Matt Arnold" sort of way, with a fetish for moderation, complete with
sex-manuals written by Jeremy Bentham, lingerie
made out of Hayek and trade statistics, garters from Wilfred Laurier himself and Edmund Burke's own
personal whip. An orgasm of decadent decency,
pity the denizens of My Lai, to have their
vaginas slashed by the army knives of such
a "pragmatic"
"non-ideological" people. She thought she should
take some of these thoughts and write
them down in her essay before she forgot
them. Man drools over lesbianism, is stimulated by virginity, over-powered by abstinence, and fascinated
with all varieties of female heterosexual
desire. Pornography is anything that manipulates female sexual desire for male ends. Which leads to the
conclusion that no portrayal of women's
sexuality should be allowed. Indeed, in order to protect
women from the degradation of male lust,
women must
be abolished. But then she paused.
The anti-pornography feminists weren't going to go anywhere. Too many on the left supported civil liberties for
them to win, the right was only mildly
amused by their support, and as for the NewRepublic crowd: these were the people who thought the best way
to fight identity politics was not to
vote for black politicians. Dworkin and MacKinnon were easy targets, and for once deserving ones.
And when you think about it, anti-porn
feminists were such pathetic losers, the only people they could convince was the Supreme Court of Canada.

"Economics is the dismal science. The leaden science." Ok,
you've plagiarized Carlyle, now
what? How about a very long and scintillating paragraph
on the topic in question. Then
back to the purple prose. There's some
very interesting metonymies that can be looked at. Note the
change in point in view. Keep an eye
on the
clock. "Falling through the rainbow is a fall
of leaden rain." Try not to
use rainbows, they're too common a metaphor. You have
to use it in a new and unprecedented
manner. "A league of accountants carry
rainbows in their suitcases."
No, too cute. "I can give you segments of
rainbows wholesale." No, too
whimsical. "I strangled my bride with rainbows."
A little too
grotesque. It brings to mind some sort of moor (In Ontario?)
where there's some sort of flower running ubiquitously around. "The
rainbow as a sign of fecundity, being
sickened in the lead that flows through underground
rivers." Sounds very English, very gentile, not at all
Jewish. Try something else.
"The
talmud says that the red in rainbows are actually the
blood of those who died in the
flood. The rainbow is not merely a sign of
redemption, but of somber memorial.
Joy and grief should be our reactions to
them." Don't know whether that's in the talmud at all, but it sounds like it should be there. After
all this is the book that tells us that
God rebuked the angels for celebrating the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. And
it does sound rather profound, but it has nothing to do with
lead. Come to think of it, it has
nothing to do with
lilacs, purged or perfectly healthy,
either.

"Leaden smugness keeps us from seeing the sorrows of the
rainbows." No, that's not
right. Almost rhymes, and that shouldn't be the case. Time for another irony. "We can not live
without lead, just as we cannot live without kitsch, for to try to
transcend lead, to build a world without
lead, is this
not a typically leaden task?" Great,
we sound like the Democratic Party with
too much caffeine. "Men are angels,"
make that men and women are angels. Or perhaps we should just let
it be men, they deserve it after
all.
"Men are angels, but angels with leaden
wings, they seek to attain the heights, but their wings draw them back to earth. And the harder they try
to fly the crueler the descent." That
sounds good. At least "the
crueler the descent" is better than "the harder
they fall." But it wasn't
really true, since she didn't believe in original
sin. How about this?
"All of us could be angels, were it not for the
wings of lead we placed on ourselves to
imitate them." That's much better.
Or slightly better.

"For centuries we purged the lilacs with leaden scythes." Not
bad, it sounds very hip, it's a nice
metaphor for the European fear of nature up until
the Renaissance. (Or was there a
European fear of nature before the Renaissance?
Was this something seen on a documentary, in a flawed work of popular history, or in a real history that was
15 years old and now out of date?
God, it's like the historiography of the witch hunts; you crash and burn there all the time.) Anyway, it
lacks something, you need more analysis.
Well actually you don't really in CanLit, since does anyone really think a pipsqueak like Atwood could
even catch Adorno's stray contempt?
The trouble with you, said Elizabeth,
is that you have no sense of fun.
Or humor. You should loosen up a bit. Or a lot. Elizabeth
was probably right, and she envied her
for being right. She was too much the cloistered
intellectual, like her librarian
parents, reading books that must be
obscure because no-one else cared for them. She remembered
reading the book of poems by Rilke that
Ignatius Wilentz
gave her and five hundred close acquaintances;
her uncle was so moderately overjoyed he rushed out and help pay for this term's textbooks. There was
too much sarcasm in her blood, in her
bile, its all purplish (much like this essay). Perhaps a male
doctor in a nice big white lab coat should
bleed it away
so she can be a nice girl and marry the
first boring dweeb with nine inches. Bloody hell he will, the world needs more sarcastic people. It
needs more cynical people. She doesn't
know the price of anything, but she knows how valueless everything is. Masscult love, computer
permutations, sneaking themselves into our souls.
So what if she becomes a bitter
old spinster. Better that than a smug
old bachelor smuggling death into our world. But you're still envious... Jerking off again...

A
counter-response, an actual response to what you're supposed to be reading, instead of metaphorical jabs at all
the inconvenient places. Try some
place exotic. But what is exotic? To the European mind all
foreigners are lascivious.
Actually, it's completely wrong to say Jews are neurotic. They're just serious people with a taste of
irony. Why did you think that? It's
like when you were fourteen and all you
couldn't concentrate and all you could
think about were the blue purples and the purple blues. And then there'd be times you were staring at into
space and then you'd think Ashes. Or
Toboggans. But try to think of someplace which isn't a substitute
for your sexual failures, someplace that
doesn't
hide your basic dullness, somewhere
where allusions aren't dancing through your head. Imagine a place
where you are. What would it be
like? Try to concentrate. Try not to think
of lilacs, rainbows or lead. Put
pen to paper (or fingers to computer)
and start writing.

"She got off the ship when it docked into the harbor. After
walking down the gangplank and moving to
the shops
that clustered near the wharf she was
accosted by a fortune-teller." A fortune-teller? That
sounds
too Arabian. Perhaps she
could get off in Marseilles. "The teller flattered her
and offered to look at her palms for a
pittance. She laughed and accepted,
and the ugly old man peered at her hands with a magnifying glass.
'Ah' he said. 'You are a woman
who
dreams her own dreams.' 'And who doesn't?'
'You'd be surprised. I see a lover in your past. You left
him one Friday evening. Why?'"

Yes, why had she? She stopped writing. Why had she left him
that rainy Friday? The answer was
simple. She wanted to go to the synagogue and he
didn't. But that wasn't the full
reason. He was the first person who had
ever gotten close to her, the first person
who got into her mind. And once
there, he began to remake it to suit himself. It was not that he
was openly anti-Jewish, he was far too
tactful a
gentile to say things like that.
It was more in the way he always seemed to have tickets for some special event that just happened to fall on a
mildly crucial holiday. It was the
way he just kept talking for just a little too long and little too harshly about some wonderful religion of love
and tolerance. It was the way he
laughed a little too loud at her sneers at Peter, especially when Peter
was being very pompous and smug and
really,
really deserved them. There was always
the strange feeling that he was trying too cleverly to convince her that she was too intelligent and too serious
for her own good. To everybody else,
including her Jewish friends, he was a fine, decent, loving human being, and her complaints, badly presented and
unconsciously confused, were just part
of her own sour and unsexually insatiable nature. They could not see how he was trying to assimilate her, into
some sort of cotton-candy fluffiness,
behind which there was nothing at all, a special sort of happy nihilism.

She
asked for more in the relationship, in an attempt to dominate him and control him more closely. She never
would do that again, because it brought
her nothing, because he was happy to fill all her desires, because it gave him the opportunity to corrupt her, to
bribe her. She deliberately became
more erratic and eccentric; he applauded it, saying it made her more feminine. He was completely disarming:
she never kicked him in the shins even
once. He even dropped hints to her parents that he might convert
to Judaism. But she saw he had no
intention
of doing so, that he would rather charm
rabbis and cantors and leave her only a hollow shell. She gave ultimatums, he accepted them all with good
cheer. It was only when he had arranged
for the two of them to go to a concert of her favourite band that she suddenly developed the irrational idea of
suddenly demanding that they stop
everything and go to her synagogue for services. It was
completely irrational; Vanessa barely went
there at all,
and there were only a few minutes before
the concert began. Naturally he refused, and so she left him and appeared in the temple soaking wet and in
tears. She cried so hard and so
loud that the ushers requested her to leave. She spent two
absolutely miserable days until she found
out on Monday
that he had already started seeing
someone else. After that she was always a little suspicious about
pacifists.

"'I left him. He wasn't good for me. What else do you have
to
tell me?' 'I see a great amount of
frustration in your life. You possess...'" Careful,
now, we don't want to flatter
ourselves too much, do we? "'you possess
great gifts, but you can't use them
for any good. Nothing you do will
serve anyone any good. Your life is marginal, and
irrelevant.' 'You're being too
vague, I want to know
more.' 'Before the moon rises today everything
will be crystal clear to you, but
it will be far too late. Failure
is inevitable, and it is senseless to resist. Such gifts are ultimately worthless, I have known many people
who have done far better without a trace
of them. Allow me a prayer to my many gods and to the great
mother, allow
me this old barbarian custom and let me
partake of this sacred rotgut. Allow me to pick me teeth with my holy toothpicks, there, that's so much
better.' And the fortune-teller took out
a strange lotion, which smelled and looked
like moldy, putrescent fat, and a bit
like urine as well. He eagerly started to rub it over his face, as he took a swig of his rotgut.

"Then, without warning, he started rubbing it on her hands. 'What
are you doing?' 'It is part of my
faith. I am commanded to smear this holy oil on
all whose palms I read.' 'But it's
disgusting!' 'You are wrong, it is actually
quite common-place and it soon
becomes innocuous. See, already the smell
has dissipated, and soon the stickiness
will evaporate as well. I must now
go, for I have many other palms to read before the day is done. Until the day when there is only the rack and
the brothel! Farewell!'

"And then he left, and she decided to keep walking the streets of Marseilles. It was already past
mid-afternoon and as she walked past the busy
cafes and newsstands she realized she could
no longer smell the lotion. She laughed, and pirouetted down a
side street, she started to clap and to
whistle and
it was only when she was far from the
cafes did she notice that a child was watching her.

"The child was a small beggar girl. She was pale, but she had not
been maimed by her parents in order
to attract
more sympathy. She was still dressed
in ragged clothes and there was dirt all over her. But she was looking at her, not asking for any
money. And then there was another small little
girl, followed by a little boy, just as
poor and as dirty as the first
one. 'I didn't know there were beggars in Marseilles.' The
children smiled innocently, they were
still
small
enough not to be cursed with the knowledge
of what was to come. And more beggar children appeared to join them, and still more. They barely
talked, they just muttered a little, and shifted
their weight from foot to foot.
Occasionally one of them began to cry,
and she wished she had some sort of handkerchief to wipe away their tears. And still more children came up,
and still more, until there were so many
in front of her it seemed that there were more beggar children than they were people in Marseilles.

"'This is so strange. Is Marseilles not a rich and wealthy city
full of humane and decent people?
How
can there be so many of you?'" Well, come to
to think of it, there was some kind of big
Socialist corruption scandal there
sometime in the past decade. And wasn't Le Pen increasing in influence there? Anyway, what happens
next? So far you don't look too much like
a plaster saint. "She only had
traveler's cheques, and not nearly enough
of them to give to all the children. Her only spare change had
been given to the fortune-teller and to
the some of
the shops she had stopped by. 'I
wish I could give you something, but I don't have anything.' All
she could do was ruefully pat the children
on the
head.

"But it turned out that was just what they wanted. That was all
they wanted, and in fact that was all they
really needed. After she patted the first
little girl, the second little girl came
up after her, and then the first little
boy. They all came, each in turn, one after the other, politely and quietly, but when they left, they
smiled, they actually seemed cleaner,
they looked healthier and even a bit fatter. And then they
started to skip, jump ropes appeared out
of nowhere,
and a few hesitant hops began to be
made, followed by some reluctant giggles, and then there suddenly burst a sea of hopscotches, of silly dances
and spinning around. And as a crowd
of adults came around to stare at the bemused woman who couldn't help patting beggar children on the head the
children started to skip and sing and
whirl around in dances like fevered dervishes." Must suppress the
obvious temptation to comment on how
particularly fevered dervishes whirl. Bet
Algerian dervishes have a really mean
whirl. Quite vicious, actually. "The
children were so active and vibrant
that the crowd was more than a little
disturbed, fearing that the children, their own children, whom they loved very much, which was why the children
didn't
ask for money (they were too proud) but
whom their parents couldn't help but dress them in rags, they feared that the children were going to get ill
or seriously get wounded by their mad
spinning. But they could soon relax as the children's spinning stopped accelerating, reached its peaks and
started to slow down. The sun was
beginning to set in the west, but the moon had yet to rise as the children's laughter quieted, as they turned
and skipped and hopped and raced even
more slowly, as she finished patting the last one of the beggar children, while the children seemed to freeze,
to wind down and then to stop in
position like run-down automatons.

"There was a low murmur from the crowd." Perhaps that should be
made an extremely nervous murmur, or a
low chorus of disapproval. "What had happened
to their children? A few of them
moved forward as not all the children had frozen yet. They looked
into their eyes and saw that their eyes
had gone
blank, and that their lids were closing.
Their skin was cool, yet shiny to the touch, the parents could see their own reflections in their children's
cheeks, and the dirt on them fell away
completely and as their rags turned into fine dresses and pants.
And the children's skin, paled by lack of
food, or
burned by too much sun, started to
assume a uniform shade, sort of like gold, then like false gold, and then the yellow started to turn an
unprecedented shade of grey, heavy and
dense, as the children were completely suffused with a covering of lead.

"The parents were horrified, but before they could do anything, an evil mist began to appear, a cloud of noxious
leaden dust appeared, gassing many of
the parents. The survivors turned back and looked at her,
helpless, in a valley of leaden
statues. 'Kill
her!' And she had no choice but to look
up at the risen moon and run through the
valley and into hiding. The crowd
chased after her, but even though they did not catch her, for the rest of her life she had to keep running, she could
never stay in any chosen place, be it a
sewer, a cave, a rubbish dump, before she was found again and had to flee for her life once more.

"And so she never knew that the statues did not just stay in the center of Marseilles, but that because of her
prayers, one day long after her death
the real benevolence of her act shone through, and the lead fell off and the children were reborn, their dirt
seemed to shine, their rags were now
something less shameful. For these new children were no longer poor beggars, but they were not angels either,
and they spent the rest of their days
helping themselves and helping others, until the end of time."

Fat
chance. Well she obviously couldn't give this to her
professor. Best to use the neatest
images and confine
oneself to facts and hard analysis,
post-modernist puffery be damned.

Meanwhile,
the meeting
that Ignatius Wilentz was attending had come to an
inglorious and inconclusive end.
There was still time to ask Miss Lightfeathers
one more question. "Talmudic Exegesis, Question number three. Do a Deconstructionist interpretation
of the Talmud."

Drogheda
Apartments was in
a nice neighborhood, and it was a perfectly respectable
place for a papal emissary to have
as his headquarters while in Canada.
There was a certain charm and innocence in the whole place as midnight
approached. In apartment 208 five year
old Timothy Walters slept peacefully, thanks to Dr. Hermann's intervention to the Holy Spirit to cure his
whopping cough. In apartment 217 Mr. and Mrs Avalon were spending
their first night together in many months
as a
direct result of Hermann's prayers.
In apartment 307 three college students were celebrating the imminent
end of term, which had gone off so much
better
because God had recently granted them
great powers of concentration. All across the building people
were sleeping peacefully or dancing
frantically
with hope in their hearts and love in
their souls. All across the building, with the exception of one apartment. In apartment
322, the lights were on, but the tape player that had been playing Beethoven's twelfth symphony
had long since shut itself off.
For in the room, sitting on his chesterfield, was not Dr. Albert
Hermann, the Albert Hermann who said
prayers on behalf of
fictional characters, the Albert Hermann
who at twenty had offered to cut off his own arm if the Hungarian
government would free Cardinal
Mindszenty, the Albert Hermann who had
struck everyone by his decency, bravery, honesty, erudition and benevolence, the Albert Hermann who was the
international leader of the Flannery
O'Connor Brigade and who carried the dagger of Saint Francis of Assisi; no, Albert Hermann was not sitting on
his chesterfield. Only his corpse
was, for the man was dead, killed by the peculiar and noxious green fumes that sifted out of the strange cube that
was lying face up on the carpet, a most
mysterious contraption with shifting doors and secret locks and special levers and indecipherable
combinations and a strange shimmering appearance,
a puzzle box that carried on its front faces of men of undoubted wisdom in the stark, subtly changing, drawing
style of five dynasties, faces which
revealed to all who could approach the deadly thing the incontestable proofs that the device that had killed
Professor Albert Hermann was indeed, a
chinese spice-box.